Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 1:49 pm Post subject: What are you Kickstartering?

Kickstarter is a crowd-funding site that takes pledges to fund ideas and make them a reality. Donors put up a certain amount of money for a project, but aren't actually billed unless the funding goal is reached. The project managers usually offer perks and bonuses at certain donation levels.
It's been around for a few years now, but just recently garnered mainstream attention due to the decision by some well-known game developers to seek funding there for projects that publishers passed over. Those projects overwhelmingly succeeded and surpassed their goals by millions of dollars. Now many independent developers are turning to the service in hopes of repeating enough of that success to see their own games to fruition.
But Kickstarter has always been more than videogames. Back in 2009 some hobbyists used it to fund the development of an open standard for mini-T slot extruded metal stock for rapid prototyping projects, that you can now find in DIY hobbyist outlets like Sparkfun. In 2010, MusOpen used the service to garner funding for several complete symphonies to be recorded by top-notch, modern orchestras and eventually release them to the public domain. Just this year, a drive to reprint two dead-tree Order of the Stick compilations was so overwhelmingly successful that all the previous books could be republished and the author committed to several new original stories.

I'm assuming the iPads are for development work. Right? As with anything else, the key is to budget appropriately and set realistic funding goals.
Another thing is that a successful fundraising doesn't mean that what you (as a donor) backed will actually work out. There is no guarantee that anything will be made except the obligatory funding bonuses. So it's best for donors not to treat this as even a pre-order system, but more as a way to say, "this is a great idea and I want this to happen."

Guess I should go first on the actual projects I'm backing, yes?
- I've pledged some money for this documentary on the MLP:FiM fan phenomenon, to be narrated by John de Lancie and directed by TV documentary producer Michael Brockhoff.
- I've put some money into the pot for this Kinect-based cell biology game that should be playable on Xbox 360, and Windows/Linux(/Mac?) PCs with the Unity3D plugin (and no Kinect required). I've seen the videos and this looks like a really beautiful and engaging way to familiarize kids with the complex machinery of cells.

I pledged to a webcomic book I wanted. There are at least three other books I would have contributed to if I had money at the time they were kickstartering. (should that be a verb?) I haven't paid any other attention to stuff.

I've backed roughly 200 projects since Kickstarter launched. Nearly all of it was visual and artistic, and a large subset is game-related. Part of my 2011 SSS gift was a kickstarter reward (Creatures). Most of my recent ones have been jumping on the game dev bandwagon, and I'm really excited about that trend.

We experimented early on with using Kickstarter for nonprofit fundraising. (This was back when Amazon Payments was processing donations without a fee, and Kickstarter wasn't collecting a fee either.) Even then, users were beginning to view the service as risk-free preordering, so we abandoned that route pretty fast.

Welp, the science videogame project fell through a few hours ago with only about 10K out of $27K pledged. Nerts.
The fandom documentary, however, crushed its goal by more than double, with ten days still to go.
I'm kinda wary about attaching to new projects purely from a personal finances standpoint right now, plus there's the chance I'll develop a dependency like Jerry Holkins. Whatever you do, DON'T post worthwhile projects that I should jump on!

Joined: 13 Jul 2006Posts: 2055Location: On the sunny side of the street

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 6:58 pm Post subject:

I have backed the Borogove card game (which was a freakin' awesome thing, I got a free deck of cards (fantastic, I tell you). Apart from that, nothing else has piqued my interest._________________WARNING: Microwave musclebear detection devices in use on these premises!

I'm funding another documentary, this one specifically about the musical side of the Brony fandom. The sheer mass of creativity in this whole Brony thing is one of the biggest, most fascinating aspects for me and I'd really like to get some more insight into the fanwork. The fan music is something I think is especially unique in terms of volume and diversity, the brony music scene has been absolutely crazy over the last year and a half. It'd be interesting to see how much of that is due to technological advances, how much is due to the source material, and so on.
The goal for this project is a lot more modest than for the all-encompassing documentary with de Lancie and Brockhoff, at a mere $2K. I don't expect it to see the same kind of run-away success, but I hope it gets enough to materialize in the end.

Well kickstarter is all or nothing - if your funding doesn't reach goal, you get nada. Rocket hub lets you keep it all (so long as supporters don't withdraw). For donors, kickstarter withdraws funds upon project completion, rocket hub withdraws funds immediately and if the project is not completed you are offered the option of return, leaving it, or transferring it to another project. Also, from my own personal experience, I like the interface and general layout of rockethub better._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake